


Thousand Eyes

by megagemini



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Cabal (Destiny) - Freeform, Destiny 2, Drabble Collection, F/F, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Minor Character Death, Pre-Red War, fireteam heartbreak, time jumps, warlocks are dramatic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-07-18
Packaged: 2019-02-27 13:48:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 3,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13249509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/megagemini/pseuds/megagemini
Summary: The withering wonders of this decaying system are cancerous between their teeth, but the undead aren't ones to let go.(Non-chronological drabble collection featuring cannon and miscellaneous Guardians before and after the Red War)





	1. Mars

**Author's Note:**

> Ikora sends a Warlock, tired and wary, to investigate a missing Titan after one of her Hidden report his Ghost's SOS was an indeciphrable warning.  
> -  
> aka  
> -  
> Ghaul didn't stumble upon success with the Light and the Traveler's cage. Through the brutality of trial and error Dead Persons became Ghosts and a wind began to rise

She holds the attrition of a thousand soldiers between her ribs and her sparrow drags over waves of cool, burning sand. For centuries, the physics of this world had fallen apart.The Warlock compares it to an ill-kept machine in silence, and speaks to her Ghost, “I hate sand.” 

It ignores her, “The compound is up ahead.” 

Ice seeped through the artificial environment of her undersuit, and she sees a Cabal flare on the horizon. Red on red. “I hate cold, too.” 

Martian plains rejected sunlight, spat it back out like a foul taste. In the machine that was one of the cogs that rusted in the Traveler’s death. Unkept, the planetoid returned to its untouched past, hollowed, empty, and indifferent.

If she took up poetry she knows how it would start: _In orbits of cold anger. Consummation in dry surf. _Tired energy congregates in her cells; she doesn’t think it will happen, there was already one Skorri.__

__But the Warlock throws a grenade and is relieved that at least gravity lingered in the degrigating atmosphere. The machine was sputtering, teetering beside broken, but the air and its weight persevere._ _

__She picks across twisted splatterings of gore and Void, mitigated under hungry terrain. Sand swallows blood and bones and memories with an indiscriminate hunger. The sun is setting, and violent hues block out tall shadows in the sky. Skyscrapers stand as black trees, creating a forest of lost things._ _

__It's pretty, but she doesn’t see why the discarded future of humanity had rushed for metal walkways and pink sunsets. Earth had those, too._ _

__“The Titan is up ahead.”_ _

__She is scrapping steel from torrid rock, and doesn’t care to see another corpse today._ _

__“Ikora asked,” It reminds her, “You said yes.”_ _

__“I know.”_ _

__“She’ll let you go to Echo Mesa soon.”_ _

__“We both know the Vanguard can’t spare Guardians right now,” the Warlock digs her boot into the grain, only slightly afraid of finding human bones, “But if we did- you think it’d be worth anything?”_ _

__“It was your idea,” It spins, pouring blue from one unblinking eye, “Why?”_ _

__Bullets chew like singularities at her hips. She would call them seeds, if she wrote, made to sow a reaper’s will. There would be a stanza on wilting gardens and tired hands, and no one would need to know it who’s._ _

__“I hate sand.” The Warlock shrugs, and laughs._ _

__No doors slide open as she walks; no enemies roaring against her re-existence. There isn’t any comfort for her in the absence. Anticipation is dancing in-between electrons, and it feels as though something terrible is waiting. Phobos stings at the nape of her neck._ _

__The Warlock’s lungs burn, and the filters labor to sift tainted air that tastes of iron and exhaust. It had been only a week of searching and the planet was already digesting the Guardian alive._ _

__She considers removing the crippled helmet, but it stays._ _

__They finds the body underneath the watchful omnipresence of a dead name. Unease came easily when looking to the clinical font of Clovis Bray. Subsoil works to swallow his Golden Age substratum, a legacy she does not trust in its repetition._ _

__“Where’s his Ghost?”_ _

__The shell spines, spilling Light to map the vast maw of possibility. Wreckage sticks from orange like needles in a pincushion. Like tombstones. It tells her something’s wrong._ _

__She almost asks if a Psion, with their clever fingers, stole it away. But what would something without the idea of a Ghost do with one? Every Guardian knew the Cabal’s ignorance towards the Light was not cemented. But she hopes. She hopes until told to do otherwise, and is guided before an arcing platform._ _

__“Its Light is gone.”_ _

__“That’s what makes it dead.”_ _

__“No.” Her Ghost flies ahead into the shadows of crumbled buildings, its voice crackling through the comms, “This feels different.”_ _

__“I hate that.”_ _

__“You hate everything.”_ _

__“Not you.” She grunts, hefting herself into the alcove. Her Ghost hovers millimeters from Cabal machines. Always too big; it made her feel silly, like a child trying on their parent’s shoes._ _

__A table chipped by sandstorms presents the Ghost like Excalibur to King Arthur._ _

__Rough and forceful, it's riddled with dents and laser-burnt holes and she thinks it looks more like a wad of paper than a sphere. Cabal handiwork at its finest, stringing the core with stiff wires pooling into fried CPUs._ _

__“We should go, I’ve taken what I can but it compromised their equipment.”_ _

__It twitches and draws closer to its Guardian._ _

__She takes the shell with equal parts horror and care, finding no point in data-mining something so thoroughly broken.The Warlock lingers, rolling a handful of scorched flanges between her fingers like dice._ _

__“Do you think Ikora would let us stay at the Tower?”_ _

__“Not Echo Mesa?” It considers her, eye dancing from the Warlock to dead Ghost, “Why?”_ _

__The Warlock decides to begin her poetry when they return. It will start, she thinks, where they all began._ _

__“We’re walking into a rising wind.”_ _

__“I thought it would've been the sand.”_ _


	2. Honey(Ikora, Osiris)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Warlock Vanguard and her old exile share an afternoon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sagira says Osiris' changed but you really don't see anything to back it up in-game which tbh is mostly bc it’s so short but uh. Like Ikora wouldn't notice??

Ikora Rey moves with the slow precision of a chess piece. She knows it is intimidating. 

“Sagira says you’ve changed.”

Her companion sees this is her first move across the black and white board behind a compatible grin. Ikora pours tea with a steady hand, and offers honey he will decline. Sunlight seeps through tapestries in opulent reds and gold. Brewing leafs turn the water in an echo. 

“She says many things,” the Exile offers, “Much the same about you.” 

“Sagira was around to see who I’ve become, Osiris, even if for a short while. I can’t say the opportunity was mutual.”

He nearly grins. There is a question under his tongue over a tea set surviving the City’s ruination. The warmth of a seeing long-past gift in present tense hands, he decides, is enough. 

“It’s fair to think she’d boast.” 

“About you, always.”

Ikora stirs. A smirk at the axis of her lip, and the Warlock knows she strikes her spoon against the glass intentionally. 

“The two of you are still unbearably similar.” 

“A side effect of sharing a neural bond, you’re not so different. But I am here now.” He flourishes, presenting, “so what do you see?”

Ikora is wholly unimpressed; the spoon twangs harshly. 

“You look awful.”

He laughs. A bone deep shudder, as Ikora Rey smiles with the same abandon of her youth. 

Osiris tells her, in silent way, he is proud. 

She hopes to do the same.


	3. Pair(Andal, Cayde)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two times, two places, where Cayde tries distracting his partner, his Vanguard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> idk how I feel about this but I want what bungie wont give lol

(1.)

Cayde-6 threw a lazy thigh over Andal’s and eased back into the Russian soil with arms crossed behind his head. 

“You’re distracting,” He shifts beneath the Exo’s heavy limb, trying with nominal effort to hide a show of teeth. 

“You’re not lookin’ at anything important.” 

“Yeah?” Andal draws back from his rifle, teasing and familiar, “And what qualifies as 'important' to you?” 

His jaw flashes like a flare beneath blue plates, and opens his arms wide. A panoramic of himself, ”Two guesses, buddy.”

“Fallen.” 

“No.” 

“Oh.Then me.” 

 

(2.)

“You ever seen the aurora borealis?” 

“Not yet,” Andal's fingers never pause over the skeleton of his weapon, each piece is run between an expensive cloth. Meticulation in care. The Exo never wasted glimmer on pricy rags, a cloak was free and served the same. Andal would laugh and tell him that’s why he changed guns like people changed clothes. Cayde would say it was because he actually shot things, "Unless the Traveler's counts."

"It doesn't."

A droid, 33-something, leaves a manilla parasol on the worn marble desk. The Exo wonders if it's faction bureaucracy or mortality rates, or some indecipherable mumbo-jumbo on Hive witches up and down in the moon- and reaches for his holster. 

“You wanna?”

His thumb traced the barrel of his hand cannon, metal slotting across metal. The cylinder rolls free with negligible resistance; martian sand stuck between the springs. Cayde watches Andal, and considers sectioning off Crucible winnings for a new one. 

Andal brings the rifle to his brow, testing a scope he'll never use, “Is this that date you owe me?”

“I’m no romantic, Brask.” 

“And I'm no Vanguard,” He laughs, a precious thing, “You’re full of it.” 

“Yeah, probably.”


	4. Dislocated

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They made it past the Cabal, unease settles in Light-born titles.

“What do you know of volcanoes?”

“They’re hot.”

She drags patterns in white powder, unbothered as ice seeps between her knuckles, “I think I was born somewhere hot.” 

“That’s nice.” 

“I think-,” the Warlock tries again, “-this is the first time I’ve seen snow.” 

“That’s nice.”

Her companion makes no move, but clutches a battered rifle between his hands so tight she sees it shake. The Titan stands, stiff and immovable like he was taught. Thoughts of permanence and duty roll between her synapses. Was the stalwart defender breaking?

She didn’t know what to look for, or how to fix it. 

They are orphaned corpses trying to remember themselves in a battered legacy, and she thinks there is solidarity in this floundering. 

Her knees crack as she rises. A hydrocarbon dot churns in the stars, singing for every extinguished Light across the comms, “Not really.” Snow would be the last thing she sees of Earth, “Zavala’s waiting.” 

“Even nicer.” 

There is a burning City at her back, it calls to places that once cradled Light, and she aches. A free hand picks at the frayed edges of her robes, weighty and ill-fitting. But the Titan marches on with fractured purpose; she supposed they both have roles to play, and follows.

"We should hope so."

The Warlock’s thoughts linger on white, on Pompeii, and if the ‘g’ should be capitalized when referring to the ball in her palm.


	5. Cat and Mouse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Toland avoids Eris for the Drama of it all, and then got pissy when people were occupied by other things in the red war lol.

If anyone asked(and no one would) he would say Eris was chasing him. How wonderfully important did that make him sound? Through territories hinged on unsteady matter, he sees her tail from planet to planet, ward to ward. She stabs them as though he can feel it.(he doesn’t).

Toland is in no rush to let her win this one sided game. 

He could not see the City fall, but the smoke formed a bridge of broken Light and it rattled in the Moon. Mercury churns-Saturn swells, and the old Warlock felt the consideration of a man lost to time drawn up. His name dies on the lips of preoccupied Guardians, and he simmers in the belly of Earth’s orbit, traversing hidden pathways and rivers and stone, a wisp of a creature, whose exile finally starts to weigh. There is a passing thought of his reclaimed gun, that Toland discards before it could settle. Until his journals are burnt in thoughtless collateral, and Oryx seems like a distant illusion-far away, tainting, poisoning no more. Toland was content(He did win, didn’t he?) until they began repairing that Wall with honor and victory as theTraveler awoke, and stung with the dissolution of his creed. 

In the end, it's he who comes to her and pretends its born from pity(a thing she’d never need). A petulant demand for attention, as Thrall chitter beneath darkened growth. This moon, he thinks offhand as Guardians toil in questions and Light and ambition, could replace his. What a wonderful, tumultuous place for the prologue of a Queen. He keeps the anticipation as a weak secret, and stands. 

Eris pretended to have stopped searching, as he pretends not to mind how she turns to him as if bored. There is little besides their silence and Her(he can feel her sing in the electron thick broth below, and often trembles in its lull) waiting, with starving broods lain in the fossilized rig. Toland holds his form as she does her breath, a dance of unraveled absence and duty. He remembers before the veil around her skull, and thinks these places have surely grown too bright for her as well. 

“Are you done?” She asks him, beneath the deluge of Titan’s sky. Ichor drips, diluted in fallen brine, down the woman’s jaw.

Toland grins and finds as much use in lies as he ever did. 

“Most likely not.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hhhhhmmmmmm ,,,, enjoy mediocre content


	6. and the Universe said,"  "(Ikora, oc)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ison's an exo Warlock and they don't trust like that lol.

“Do you think this existence against the Dark was earned-” Ikora wonders, unbalanced between speaking and speaking to, “-or the incident of chance?” 

Ison does not know how to answer, and they think it unfair to ask. They fold in on themselves, robes shuffling as they do. The Warlock wishes they had focused more on thanonautics, “My recollections of the Golden Age are fractured, Ikora. I remember less than most.” 

A half lie, as the chalk-drawn outline of humanity wavers in their mind. Ison looks to the table-tablets and baubles and book strewn in disorder, the single flange of an old shell is propped against parchment. A bronze plated display glints up at them, used to hold a corner of Cayde’s tattered map. They remember what they can in the faint glow of Ikora’s bond, of their planet.

They think the Earth was a young thing then, made of sunlight and honeyed pride; the Warlock doesn't believe it was the universe who looked to them, in terrible indifference, and thought, _‘let there be Night’._  


Pride didn't feel like a sin worthy of attrition.

“You ask for answers that outweigh the question.” And that is all they can offer, with Void tingling behind their palms. 

Ikora laughs, deep and quiet, in the way she does and always has, “I suppose you’re right, maybe I should finish with circles before wading in existentialism.” 

The other Warlock turns from her to the yawning hall, to the sleeping Traveler, and guilt sinks in reimagined veins. 

“I think...,”a slow tentativeness settles in their voice, and lessons of hubris in their iron, “maybe, it’s time we consider a catalyst.” 

The Light was blinding, so they did not see. In the end, they were killed for it. 

“Godly powers do not meet by the likes of mortal coincidence.” 

The Vanguard hums, and they feel as though they've said too much.


	7. empty hearths,empty words(toland & eris)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Toland is a brat and im drunk so if this doesn't make any sense that why lol but i hope you like it anyway yeehaw

Eris sat criss-cross on cool linoleum as the shade laughs like he isn’t twice half dead, crooning on Kings and Queens and lineage and swords and the Logic that binds them. He laughs, empty, as though they are inside the same joke, like there isn't an army at their door. Eris bends into the absent flow of his words, and plans. 

"It won't be long now, you know." Toland is comparable to a hot knife as he slides through the dark. A paper lantern illuminates the pair in tentative light. Neither had the need for much of it, but Eris appreciated the reminder it cast through his noncommittal specter. 

“The Realm is precarious in anticipation for its King.”

She knows this as truth, and is prepared. 

“Will you be safe?”

“Eris, Eris, Eris,” he tuts, “am I ever not?” The words sound frail against the night air. She isn’t fond of the uncertainty in Toland’s posture. 

“I wouldn’t ask if you were.”

“Dower.” 

Willing himself into stability he sits next to her, observing through the window. There's a pull to his face and lean in his frame Eris recognizes. The upending sentiments of messy, stubborn life. That quiet belonging-unspoken until dead- usually sang the loudest. Resentful things that catch along the fractured edges of his glass composure. 

“I will be fine.”

“Similar things have been said, and wrong.” 

She thinks to her Ghost, and Toland's, and the uneven hollows they left behind. There is no beautiful symmetry for them to line up the fractures and reveal a bittersweet whole, but the absence that bridges. Her energies unfurl without direction. His own answer, brittle and dark, like his Light had been. 

His eyes shift to her, and Eris sees the weight in his hunched spine that makes her wonder if Ir Yut's transfiguration was as immortalizing as he prayed.

“What are you thinking about, Eris.” Toland asks her. 

Eriana’s memory flickers in radiant passing. She remembers their conversations, the quiet mutterings against a better conscious. 

“Admitting ignorance?”

“Don’t be an imp.” 

Eris folds her fingers. The City bellow gleams behind walls.

"We came before the pit in pursuit of revenge, for Eriana's Crusade," she begins,“Then, Erianna asked you not to lie.” 

She counts three seconds before she breathes again, listening to the beating of her heart. Eris wonders, with his new form if he thought to imitate that, too. 

“What should’ve been said?” He asks, an unkind smile sits tired on his face. 

“Not to omit.” 

Toland grins now, a gleam in his eye, non-Light playing against the empty air, “Clever, dear, tenacious Eris, will you ask this of me?” 

She shakes her head, and understands. 

"Do you tell the sun not to rise?"

"Still.."He is as present as moth wings, existing in vapors that dance around her skin, haunting beneath collagen and marrow-Toland calls, curved, jagged, in the shell of her ear, “Are we capable of such a terrible loyalty, Eris? I do wonder.”

Toland’s dramatics were a cruel reminder of his paracasuality. 

He turns from her to face the night. Chitin and rags splayed beneath his hands. Something in the way his jaw clicks into place, with tooth pressed against tooth, makes Eris wonder what he fears most- death or punishment in its avoidance?

Robes fold coarsely as he turns, and his fingers press against the bone plate seared into her skull, "Will the exigency of death be so easily deterred?" 

Toland scrutinizes her like a thing to be fixed. Working the wrappings until they fall free around her neck, he watches ichor run free. She will allow him this: fantasies of a Sea seen by two in faux-eternity. Ones to snub his withdrawn existence as he drifts, insecure in wormless imitations of Hive immortality. When she crawled from the regolith and chalk of the moon, with the sticky residue of Toland’s Light eviscerated in a thousand pieces. It weighed, and seeped, settling in wet stone. The moon rattled, a hungry thing(she wonders if the rattle remained, and what else remembers down, down in the deep.)

"We'll see soon enough, won't we?"

Eris watches him. Unconvinced as he laughs, shrill and stuttering, with that eternal ghost and trembling heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> every single one of my dying braincells r focused on typing i can feel them go.
> 
> http://whatinsamhill.tumblr.com/post/167994209016/open-thread-eris-mornclose-thread
> 
> also follow me on tumblr i post art and thats what i think eris looks like bc im tired of seeing her w/ those 20 inch brazilian bundles let a girl look haggard shes seen some shit... anyway... thats my ted talk


	8. Solstice(haven-9)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning for child death. Anyways all the new solstice lore fucking killed me this 1 is for my hunter Nines during the City fall, right after her lights gone.
> 
>  
> 
> Just because it’s right thing to do doesn’t mean it’s good.

She staggered from a corpse of pillars and winking neon lights. One sputters and dies. Even with Exo eyes Nines could barely see through the smog. But hear? She still had that.

First a whimper, then a smell like getting punched in the gut. She looks down.

Something almost living was mangled near Nines’ boot. A child. What used to be a child. Nothing left to look at but charred meat and a bright blue scrap of fabric. Not even the eyes. She identifies the blue as a toy cloak, and it’s like losing the Light all over again.

“Hey! You there, kid?”

He wheezes, something broken. Nines pauses. One beat. Two. Three. Then knows what she needs to do.

“Shh, it’s okay.” Smoke this sweet wasn’t born from gasoline and wood. Nines couldn’t vomit, but it close. Turning off her olfactory functions felt like cheating. Shouldn’t have let it happen to begin with. “We got the Cabal running like dogs.” She says, as if the sky wasn’t fire. “Glad I found you, kiddo, the afterparty starts soon.”

“That Oryx Guardian got their flagship; brought it down on two more. Show off, huh?”

He fits easily in her lap. Nines pulls out her gun. Careful. Quiet. She wraps a hand around his shoulder. It was shaking. Eyes closed, she inhales. Mercy never meant kind.

“Let’s get you home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks 4 reading!

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!  
> suggestions/requests are welcome lol


End file.
